She’s leaving home: Breakdown, by Cathy Sweeney, reviewed

The narrator of Cathy Sweeney’s first novel has finally cracked. I say ‘finally’ because there have been signs: drinking alone; disliking her daughter, or at least her type; having an affair with her friend’s son; opening a separate bank account in her maiden name when her mother died. But in the beginning we don’t know any of this. We don’t know what she’s doing, and neither does she. It’s an ordinary Tuesday in November when she leaves her comfortable home in the suburbs of Dublin, which she shares with her husband and their two almost-adult children: ‘I grab my handbag and keys, let the front door shut behind me. I have no idea that I will never come back.’

What follows is a taut tale of the protagonist’s journey by car, train, bus and ferry. Time flits between her present movements and future destination (a neglected cottage in Wales), charting her feelings as she tries to make sense of what’s happening in real time and her thoughts weeks and months later. We learn that she’s tired of putting plates in the dishwasher, pairing socks and having predictable sex; that things have been mounting up ‘in drawers, racks, presses… in the back of my mind, in the arteries of my heart’. It’s not that she’s looking for anything more, or planning to bolt. ‘What I want is to be silent. Or else to have a conversation that does not revolve around my husband, my daughter, my son, my dead mother, my job or my house.’

The job? Art teacher, though she wanted to be an artist: ‘The Story of How a Woman Becomes a Teacher and Not an Artist is an old one.’ The husband? Logical rather than emotional.